Google Patents Software that Identifies Real World Objects within Videos

Google, using the software, wants to scan and analyze the content within videos, YouTube videos we assume, and look for real world objects, identify them, and make a catalogue out of those objects. The patent describes Google’s technology of scanning a video, picking out landmarks, objects and context; with subsequent tagging categorization.

The search engine giant is of the opinion that conventional systems that may be carrying out such tasks and identifying objects more or less rely on direct human input that is neither scalable nor cost efficient.

‘… such human input is expensive, time-consuming, and cannot scale up to handle very large data sets comprising hundreds of thousands of objects and millions of images’, notes Google in its patent.

So, how will this work? Consider that you have shot a video of you and your friends at the New York Times Square and have uploaded it onto YouTube or any other video site which Google has access to. Google will, through its patented technology analyze the video, identify the objects within it and possibly tag the video ‘The Times Square’ and ‘New York’.

In the patent dubbed ‘automatic large scale video object recognition‘, Google has also said that it plans to build “a set of object names comprises at least 50,000 entries”, which may comprise of various objects – landmarks would definitely be at the top of the list.

But, all is not rainbow when it comes to practical implementation of this technology. Privacy issues will definitely come to the forefront and there will by many who wouldn’t want Google to ‘analyze’ videos let alone tag and categorize them as it deems fit.

Ravi is the founder of Parity Media and currently acting as an editor of ParityNews.com. He is a technology enthusiast with keen interest in information security. Ravi has over 6 years of experience and is keen on raising general awareness about technology in society.